November 29, 2003

How's your copperosity sagaciating?

Geoff Nunberg
objects to the New York Times'
quotation of Guy Bailey to the
effect that r-lessness spread in Texas from the children of plantation owners
who went to England for schooling and picked up the fashion there. I don't know
whether that's what Guy really said -- it wouldn't be the first time that the
NYT got a quotation or attribution garbled. And certainly both Nunberg and Bailey
know a lot more about this than I do.

But in the course of putting together a lecture for an undergraduate course,
I happen to have stumbled over a fascinating bit of trivia about r-lessness
in 19th-century America, involving Uncle Remus, James Joyce, and the British
recognition of the Republic of Texas. So here goes.

Loss of syllable-final /r/ was a change in progress in England in colonal times,
variably distributed by geography and social class. As a result, the complex
geographical and social patterns of r-lessness in the U.S. could logically have
three sources: settlement patterns, patterns of continued contact with England,
and local sociolinguistic dynamics.

The traditional account (as e.g. in (Richard) Bailey 1996 and Lass 1992) was
that loss of postvocalic /r/ in England was a 17th and 18th century phenomenon.
Thus r-lessness would have been widespread (but not universal) during the period
when English speakers emigrated to North America, and thus settlement patterns
are a likely source of influence.

However, recent research suggests that "... most of England
was still rhotic ... at the level of urban and lower-middle-class speech in
the middle of the nineteenth century, and that extensive spreading of the loss
of rhoticity is something that has occurred subsequently..." (Peter Trudgill, "A Window on the Past:
"Colonial Lag" and New Zealand Evidence for the Phonology of Nineteenth-Century
English". American Speech 74(3) 1999).

If this is true, then U.S. settlement patterns are less relevant, and patterns
of contact with England are more relevant. Prof. Bailey may have some evidence
about this, I don't know.

However, I do want to cite one interesting piece of evidence in favor of an
earlier adoption of r-lessness in the American south in general and Texas in
particular.

On this web
page, one Mike Schwitzgebel cites his Ohio grandfather's use of the word "copperosity".
He tracks this via the OED to corporosity, "Bulkiness of body.
Also used in a humorous title or greeting', with a citation to James Joyce Ulysses
418 "Your corporosity sagaciating O K? ". This in turn is apparently
a reference to Joel Chandler Harris' The Tar Baby and other Tales of Uncle
Remus, where "copperosity" and "segashuate" represent the African-American vernacular pronunciations of these words.

Schwitzgebel tracks the Harris/Joyce greeting further to Nicholas Doran P.
Maillard's 1842 History of the Republic of Texas. Maillard was a British lawyer
who lived in Richmond, Texas, for about nine months during the year 1840. His
book was a virulent anti-Texas screed, published in the hope of influencing
British public opinion against diplomatic recognition of the Republic of Texas.
Maillard describes the infant republic as "stained with the crime of
Negro slavery and Indian massacre", and "filled with habitual liars,
drunkards, blasphemers, and slanderers; sanguinary gamesters and cold-blooded
assassins; with idleness and sluggish indolence (two vices for which the Texans
are already proverbial); with pride, engendered by ignorance and supported by
fraud." Maillard also cites "How does your copperosity sagaciate this
morning?" as a typical Texas greeting.

Make of it what you will. Myself, I've got a bunch of people coming this afternoon
for a traditional Thanksgiving dinner on a non-traditional day, and I need to
go get the neo-turkey into the post-thanksgiving oven.

[Update: now that the turkey is stuffed and in the oven, and other preparations are well underway, I need to add that I don't subscribe to Maillard's description as an accurate characterization of Texans, whether in 1840 or 2003, and especially not of my wife.]